[1203] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: outages, quality monitoring, trouble tickets, etc
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matt Zimmerman)
Tue Nov 28 18:43:02 1995
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 18:31:56 -0500 (EST)
From: Matt Zimmerman <mdz@netrail.net>
To: Jon Zeeff <jon@branch.com>
cc: Jonathan Heiliger <loco@mfst.com>, smd@chops.icp.net, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <m0tK9lx-000Nj7C@aero.branch.com>
On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, Jon Zeeff wrote:
> Being in the web hosting business, we measure our own "availability"
> and that of others. The top providers do 99.9%. The median
> in our sample group is 98.5%. That's about 15 times worse and
> 11 hours/month.
>
> It's amazing how many of the companies in the low 98s claim 99.9%.
I'd be terribly interested to know how you obtained these figures...we do
web hosting services as well. I had one of our clients complain angrily
for weeks that his web site was frequently "down" because he couldn't get
to it from AOL. I had to sit him down and show that his site was
operational and accessible from a dozen other sites to convince him that
AOL was the exception, and that our connectivity and server reliability
were not to blame.
I find it hard to believe that many providers could offer only 98%
reliability (assuming, of course, that this is a measurable quantity;
this is shaky ground); this implies that over an average period of 100
hours (less than 4.2 days), there exists a total of 2 _hours_ of
"downtime" (assuming, again, that this, too, is determinable in any
meaningful sense).
> We also offer guarantees to some of our customers. If we don't meet
> x% availability, we refund $xx. It's not enough to break us, but
> it does reassure the customer that we are concerned.
Do you take the customer's word for it?
> If more providers did this, we would probably see much more
> rapid progress towards more reliable networks. As it is, nobody
> has a quantifiable cost for "unreliability".
I think the reason for this is obvious. If a customer complains that
your network is unreliable because he can't reach it from point X, do you
give him a refund? Not all of us can afford that...I know we get more
than a few complaints of this type every month.
// Matt Zimmerman Chief of System Management NetRail, Inc.
// mdz@netrail.net sales@netrail.net
// (703) 524-4800 [voice] (703) 524-4802 [data] (703) 534-5033 [fax]
